Editor's note: This post is a submission to Fordham's 2018 Wonkathon. We asked assorted education policy experts whether our graduation requirements need to change, in light of diploma scandals in D.C., Maryland, and elsewhere. Other entries can be found here.

It’s easy for us armchair-quarterbacks of education to cast stones at teachers and principals who give diplomas to students who didn’t earn them. But a more constructive conversation would start with a mea culpa: We have made a complete hash of the policies governing high schools and what’s expected of young people seeking to graduate from them. Until we fix that, we should expect the cheating and gaming to continue.

Our first mistake was to set sky-high goals around graduation rates, while allowing local officials great discretion in defining what it takes for students to earn a diploma. If this mistake sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same one we made when we set near-universal proficiency in reading and math as a national goal under No Child Left Behind, but let states define “proficiency” as they saw fit.

Both sides of this equation are off. As my colleague Brandon Wright pointed out recently, almost a third of students leaving eighth grade are achieving “below basic” in math and reading, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. For low-income students, it’s 40 percent, and for African American students it’s more than half. Roughly speaking, these students are entering ninth grade achieving at or below a sixth-grade level.

Getting almost all of these students to meet high school graduation standards within four years, as federal and state policies expect, is utterly unrealistic—unless the standard for graduation is set at a ridiculously low level, or winked at while being applied. And because most states no longer have graduation or end-of-course exams in place to act as a check—a worrying policy drift in its own right, and one that’s gotten far too little attention—local officials and educators can and do engage in the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Teachers can be encouraged, at least implicitly, to give D’s instead of F’s, or prohibited from giving students a “zero” for assignments they never turned in. Vendors of “credit recovery” programs—also little examined and full of greedy operators—can be hired to help “credit-deficient” students make remarkable (and dubious) progress in a short amount of time. And if that doesn’t work, states can greenlight other workarounds, as Ohio has been doing with its “alternative pathways” in recent years.

If we actually care about students meeting standards that prepare them for life after high school—and I believe that’s what most policymakers and policy wonks earnestly intend—we should rethink what’s reasonable in terms of graduation rates, while also stiffening our graduation requirements. In other words, we need a complete policy-180.

Regarding rates, schools that take in lots of students who are way below grade level will need, at minimum, more time to help them reach standards, meaning that a four-year cohort rate is inappropriate for them. It’s already common in many places to look at the five-year cohort, too. There’s probably a good case for six. Perhaps there’s also a way to apply “value added” thinking to the calculation of grad rates to reward schools that make strong gains with previously underperforming students.

And states need to find better ways to make sure students are actually meeting standards, probably via tests. If state policymakers are worried about denying diplomas to kids who can’t pass, they should pony up the money for those students to enroll in another year of high school until they do.

***

Our second big mistake in recent years has been to resist anything resembling tracking. We cling to the notion that all students should be doing more or less the same thing as they march from ninth through twelfth grade.

Our discomfort with tracking is understandable, given the racist and classist history of twentieth-century America’s “voc-tech,” which regularly sent children of color to low-level programs so they could learn to “work with their hands.” As recently as a decade ago, when Michelle Rhee’s team stormed D.C., they found a high school in Anacostia still teaching shoe-shining. It’s no surprise that tracking is a third rail.

Yet it’s also undeniable that the needs and interests of high-school age kids vary dramatically, and meeting those needs will require significantly different educational offerings. That’s true on the front end—the achievement level of students as they enter high school—and it’s true on the back end—their post-secondary plans and what they need to be ready for them.

Though career and technical education has staged a reputational comeback in recent years—including among reformers and politicians—it remains controversial to imply that, at some point in the life of a high schooler, it’s appropriate to ask them to choose to follow either a traditional college-prep route or a technical-training route. Instead we now say that students should be ready for “college and career” not “college or career” and make everyone take the same courses.

The U.S. is an outlier among advanced nations in this respect, and it results in a system whereby millions of teenagers sleepwalk through so-called college-prep classes, graduate (sometimes without earning it), get pushed into college (often into remedial courses), and quickly drop out. It’s “bachelor’s degree or bust,” and for the majority of kids, the result is bust.

So what might work better? Twelve years ago, the Tough Choices or Tough Times report made an intriguing set of recommendations that would make the American system more like those in Europe. It’s time to dust it off again. Here’s my spin on them.

In ninth or tenth grade, all students should sit for a set of gateway exams. Think of them as high school “entrance exams” rather than “exit exams.” They would assess pupils on reading, writing, math, science, history, and civics—the essential content and skills that all students should be expected to know to be engaged and educated citizens. There would also be a component assessing students’ career interests and aptitudes as best as these can be gauged for fifteen-year-olds.

Students who pass the exams would then choose among several programs for the remainder of their high school years—programs that all could take place under the same roof. Some would be traditional “college-prep,” with lots of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, or dual-enrollment courses. Others would be high quality career and technical education offerings designed to lead directly into degree or certificate programs at a technical college. All of the programs could set entrance requirements that ensure that students are ready to succeed in them. And their selectivity would make them prestigious and appealing to a wide range of students. At the end of high school, students would graduate with special designations on their diplomas indicating that they are ready for postsecondary education or training without the need for remediation.

Students who don’t pass the exams would enter developmental programs specifically designed to help them catch up and pass the tests on their second or third (or fourth or fifth) tries. Those that catch up quickly can join their peers in the college-prep or CTE programs.

***

It should be obvious, but these would be enormous shifts in the way American high schools function. Yet most high school traditions could continue unscathed, especially if these various pathways occur under one roof in comprehensive schools. The sports teams, the theater programs, the debate clubs—all of that could continue. But what students are actually doing between 8:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. would change dramatically.

It’s a lot to tackle. It’s harder than just chastising teachers and principals who graduate kids who can’t read or do math. But in my view, its time has come. Perhaps one of the men or women running for governor this year would like to give it a try.

Editor's note: This post is a submission to Fordham's 2018 Wonkathon. We asked assorted education policy experts whether our graduation requirements need to change, in light of diploma scandals in D.C., Maryland, and elsewhere. Other entries can be found here.

The battery of questions in this year’s Wonkathon prompt is a good one, and they are all deserving of consideration. But I think it overlooks a major consideration: Why four years?

The definition of high school graduation that includes the qualifier “within four years” is now rarely even explicitly expressed, and yet it represents a perverse disincentive in the current system.

Consider this story from early in my own career. I met Pat (not the person’s actual name, of course) in Pat’s freshman year. Pat was taking low-level courses to avoid challenges that were well within Pat’s capabilities, but for a variety of reasons, school wasn’t really Pat’s thing. Pat stumbled through freshman year, and then completely bombed sophomore year and had to repeat most of those courses. Pat turned up in my eleventh grade classroom—now taking higher level, college-bound courses. Pat was a new student. “I was a dope,” Pat told me. “I was wasting my time, but now I’m going to do something with my life.” Pat worked through eleventh grade, continued taking college-prep courses as a senior, graduated, and went on to college, earning a degree in communications.

I would consider Pat one of our great success stories. But it took Pat five years, so to the graduation rate figures, Pat is no different than a student who drops out halfway through high school and never comes back.

Pressure to inflate grades, bogus credit-recovery courses, just plain D.C.-style fraud—these things don’t happen just because school districts are under pressure to graduate students. They happen because districts are under pressure to graduate students Right Now! In Four Years! (The formula has been fiddled with in the last decade, but the four-year deadline remains.)

For all the reform talk these days about personalization and flexibility, policymakers still deny public schools the flexibility to say to a student, “We are going to get you through this. We are going to see you succeed, even if it takes a little bit longer than it does for some of your peers.”

Instead, we have a measuring system that says the instant a student falters or stumbles, there is no benefit to the school in helping that student make it to the finish line a little bit later. A student who has to repeat a year is as bad on paper as a student who walks away and never comes back—but the student who stumbles and stays is far more trouble.

I’ll say without hesitation that the vast majority of schools and teachers work with that stumbling student on the five- (or six-) year plan because it’s the right thing to do, the choice that best fulfills our professional sense of responsibility. But it’s not the choice that our current definition of “graduation rate” rewards. Instead, our current definition rewards getting a diploma in every student’s hand after just four years, no matter what corners must be cut to do so.

Course credits and attendance are more than enough to determine readiness for a diploma. Exit exams, the Big Standardized Test, and credit recovery don’t really add any useful information, and they are all tightly tied to other systems of perverse incentives.

There is no reason for the traditional frame of coursework to be wired to a ticking four-year time-bomb. Removing that four-year deadline would give schools and students some breathing room to get things right instead of worrying about getting it right now.

Editor's note: This post is a submission to Fordham's 2018 Wonkathon. We asked assorted education policy experts whether our graduation requirements need to change, in light of diploma scandals in D.C., Maryland, and elsewhere. Other entries can be found here.

A little over a decade ago, Chicago Public Schools began tracking the number of freshmen failing two or more classes who had a 10 percent absence rate or more than eighteen unexcused absences in a year. Data from the Consortium on Chicago School Research showed that, once students hit this threshold, their likelihood of dropping out skyrocketed.

Today, thanks to this system of tracking freshmen attendance and grades, Chicago’s high school graduation rate is up more than 20 percentage points and is approaching the national average, despite having a student population that is much poorer than the nation as a whole.

The “freshmen on track” metric works because it is based on reliable data points that are unlikely to be corrupted. At a time when people are questioning the validity of high school diplomas, student grades and attendance could provide an answer to the question, “What standards should students meet to graduate from high school?”

Let’s start with attendance. High-school students are old enough to take responsibility for getting to school and doing their work. Attendance is an objective metric we already measure and, short of lying, is not easily corruptible.

We can partly blame parents if kids don’t show up, but we can’t hold parents accountable in any meaningful way, despite some alarming and misguided attempts that landed poor parents in jail for their child’s truancy. These cases typically involve younger children for whom parent responsibility is primary.

Arguably, schools and teachers share some responsibility for low attendance if students are not engaged, but again, it’s very hard to measure. Low engagement might show up in measurable ways like low participation in school activities or underachievement (low grades among kids with high test scores). Principals or teacher leaders can also assess engagement through observation.

But engagement is still hard to measure because it’s not objective and is easily corruptible if principals arbitrarily set the bar low. We cannot build an accountability system around levels of student engagement, even if it’s a worthwhile thing to assess and monitor.

The bottom line is that, absent extenuating circumstances like extreme personal trauma, if high school students don’t consistently show up at school, we should hold them accountable by denying them a diploma.

The other relevant indicator is student grades, although this is considerably more subjective. One teacher’s “A” could be another teacher’s “C.” One teacher’s “C” could be another teacher’s “F.” But even with variance in grading and absent outright deceit, grades generally indicate if a student is passing a course and doing the work.

A related question is: How do we know if a student is college-ready? This one’s easy: college entrance exams and passing grades on advanced placement tests. As we say in the music business, KISS—"keep it simple stupid.” High Advanced Placement passing rates and ACT/SAT scores are crystal clear, highly incorruptible metrics of academic success and college readiness.

As for “career-ready,” no one really knows what the term means. It could be tied to an industry certificate like a NIMS credential, which certifies readiness to work in manufacturing. We could also establish an agreed-upon set of work skills—like the Common Core for career and technical education—but it would no doubt be slaughtered on the altar of local control.

Instead, “career-ready” should be tied to what employers actually value, which is work experience. A student who wants to go straight to work after high school should acquire work experience in high school—proof that he or she can show up on time, hold down a job for more than a week, and get an employer to provide a positive reference.

Countless young people start working in high school—baby-sitting, burger-flipping, etc. High schools should take responsibility for helping eleventh and twelfth grade students find work, or for giving them work experience in the school building. Pay students to stock shelves, clean up science labs, mow athletic fields, or tutor younger students.

As for exit exams, there are two problems. First of all, it is wrong to deny a diploma to a student who shows up for four years and does the work, even if he or she tests poorly.

So, what would a diploma tied to attendance and grades mean for the American high school today?

First of all, it means that kids are responsible for showing up. This puts indirect, justified pressure on parents to do their part. It also puts some pressure on the school to keep kids engaged, so responsibility is shared.

Second, it means that grades—even if low—indicate that the student is doing the work. Teachers, parents, and kids take grades seriously. Policymakers should too.

Third, it means that, aside from accommodations for students with disabilities, high schools should teach all kids to grade-level standards through twelfth grade. They should not lower standards. Learning goals should be consistent, agreed-upon, and ambitious.

Finally, it also means that it’s up to kids and parents to decide if they are college material or not. Schools cannot and should not make this decision because they will invariably get it wrong. We have too much evidence of race-based tracking to go down that path again.

Ultimately, a high school diploma based on attendance and grades signals that the student isn’t a quitter. Diplomas could also be modified to indicate whether a student finished on time or through a credit-recovery program.

Based on these currently available and highly reliable metrics, districts and states can hold high schools accountable and parents are in a good position to judge school quality. They will know that graduation rates are based on the number of students meeting attendance requirements and passing their classes. They will know how many students graduate on time or through credit recovery programs. They will know the level of rigor based on the number of students taking AP courses and passing AP exams. They will know the number of students taking college entrance exams and getting “college-ready” scores. And ideally parents would also know how many students enroll in college and complete within six years, but this information is harder to track.

A high graduation rate also implies something positive about student engagement, school safety, and student morale—issues parents care deeply about. Essentially, by linking graduation to grades and attendance, parents can tell how well a school is serving all kids.

On this week's podcast, Mike Petrilli, Chad Aldis, and Alyssa Schwenk discuss what it will take to get gubernatorial candidates to embrace ed reform. During the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines the cost effectiveness and return on investment of charter schools in eight American cities.

Solving the “thirty-million-word gap” is not as simple as pouring more language into a child’s ears until she catches up with her peers. New research from a team at MIT points to “conversational turns”—defined as an adult utterance followed by a child utterance, or vice versa, with no more than a five-second pause between the two—as the best predictor of scores on standardized tests of vocabulary, grammar, and verbal reasoning. These findings were independent of parental education levels, socioeconomic status (SES), and the amount of language to which children were exposed in the home. The senior researcher on the team described conversational turns as “almost magical” in their ability to build language competence in children.

The study involved thirty-six children between the ages of four and six and their parents. All were native English speakers, and the children were typically developing, with no history of premature birth, neurological disorders, developmental delay, speech/language therapy, or grade repetition. All participants passed a pre-test hearing screening. The children participated in a functional MRI task (fMRI) that monitored neural activity in Broca’s area, the part of the brain most associated with language production and processing. The task involved passively listening to short, simple stories geared to their age and with incidents deemed familiar to most children (e.g., playing games, getting hurt, etc.). Children completed standardized behavioral assessments to characterize verbal and nonverbal cognitive skills. Each family was also given a recording device—worn on the child’s clothing—that recorded up to sixteen hours of audio from the child’s perspective. The recordings were processed to determine the total number of adult words spoken, the total number of child utterances, and the total number of adult-child “conversational turns.”

As other research has shown, higher parental education and SES are significantly correlated with more language exposure for children—both in number of adult words heard and more conversational turns experienced. But socioeconomic status only explained a moderate share of the differences in language exposure, indicating that there was wide variability within families of similar SES. When looking at the adjusted assessment scores, conversational turns came to the fore as the strongest predictive variable. And fMRI results on the children’s passive listening test reinforced the test score analysis. The more conversational turns a child experienced, the greater the activation in Broca’s area during language processing, independent of the child’s SES, cognitive ability, or sheer numbers of adult words and child utterances. The neural pattern observed explained 48 percent of the relation between children’s conversational turns and their verbal scores.

The researchers connect their findings with prior research on younger children showing similar importance of qualitative aspects of children’s language experiences over sheer quantity of language experienced, with the additional support of test scores and neural imaging data. They speculate on the value of context and feedback during the turn-taking process in bolstering language processing and word understanding.

Limitations to the study relate to the exclusion of all but typically-developing children, a lack of detail on the nature of the conversational turns taken (sense versus nonsense, proper English versus “baby talk,” etc.), and a concern that low SES and language “deprivation” might have registered among potential subjects as having a non-typical development. However, these findings seem to be an important addition to the research into how language is processed in the developing brain. If the suspected external elements of the word gap, such as family socioeconomic status and parental education level, can be mitigated or corrected as this research suggests, we ought to strongly encourage parents to have more conversations with their kids. Further research should attempt to account for the limitations noted here and to drill further into the mechanism by which the most meaningful language processing occurs.

Despite most charter schools’ lack of equitable access to state and local education funds, many have reported positive results, particularly in cities. But there’s little research on how effectively charter and traditional public schools (TPS) use their dollars to produce academic gains. So let’s welcome a new report from Corey DeAngelis and his colleagues at the University of Arkansas that examines this issue in eight U.S. cities: Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, New York City, San Antonio, and Washington, D.C.

The analysts compare charter and TPS cost-effectiveness and return on investment (ROI). They calculate the former as the ratio of per-pupil school funding, including both public money and philanthropic donations, to average eighth grade 2015 NAEP math and reading scores. And they compute ROI as the ratio of schools’ overall K–12 education investments to students’ projected lifetime earnings, which they measure using three metrics: each location’s 2016 average statewide earnings, CREDO measurements of learning gains, and the estimated impacts of cognitive ability on lifetime earnings.

De Angelis et al. find that, for every $1,000 in school funding, charter schools produce an average of 4.34 more points on NAEP reading than traditional public schools, and 4.73 more points on NAEP math, across the eight cities. This equates to a 32 percent and 33 percent advantage for reading and math, respectively. Indeed, charter schools in every city examined were more cost-effective than TPS in both academic subjects, although the differences vary. In Washington, D.C., charters are 67 percent more cost-effective in reading and 68 percent more cost-effective in math than the city’s TPSs, but Houston charters are just two percent more cost-effective than TPS in both subjects.

The report also finds that the charter sectors in all eight cities produce a higher return on investment than the TPS sectors. Every dollar invested in a student who attends a charter from kindergarten through twelfth grade produces $1.77 more income for that student, on average, than if the student had attended a TPS. And those who split their K–12 experience between charters and TPSs will see an average of $0.72 more in projected lifetime income per dollar invested than those who exclusively attended TPS. Similar to the differences in city-specific cost-effectiveness, Houston charter sector showed the smallest ROI advantage, at 4 percent, and Washington, D.C., had the largest, with 85 percent.

Despite its rigorous descriptive analysis, however, the study has a few limitations. First, based on the availability of NAEP data, the analysis is limited to cities with charter sectors that outperform their TPS counterparts, which could skew results. Second, due to a lack of data, the report is unable to compare outcomes based on student demographics, including race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or special education enrollment. Such subgroup analysis is important because urban charter schools have been found to be particularly effective at raising achievement for poor and minority students, but have also been criticized for under-enrollment of students with special needs. And third, ROI calculations are based on projected rather than actual incomes, thus limiting their reliability.

As charter school advocates work to change state and municipal policies to provide more equitable funding, this report provides evidence that money allocated to charters is a worthy investment.